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You may not know Eben Alexander, but you might have heard of his work.

Esther Zuckerman reports:

In his book, Alexander claims that when he was in a coma caused by E. coli bacterial meningitis, he went to heaven. Of course, Dittrich's piece is not the first time that Alexander's text has come into question. In April, Michael Shermer at Scientific Americanexplained how the author's "evidence is proof of hallucination, not heaven." But Dittrich calls into question not what Alexander experienced so much how he did. While Dittrich looks at legal troubles Alexander had during his time practicing neurosurgery, perhaps the most damning piece of testimony comes from a doctor who was on duty in the ER when Alexander arrived in 2008. Dr. Laura Potter explains that she "had to make the decision to just place him in a chemically induced coma."

In a hey-look Esquire investigation, strangely not titled "Shooting Fish In A Barrel," Luke Dittrich goes to town on the good doctor. Apparently he was not in a devastated brain-state past the frontiers of medical consciousness. Apparently he was not ushered to the gates of heaven -- and beyond -- by the ravages of E. Coli. Alexander, writes Dittrich, claims that

by conventional scientific understanding, "if you don't have a working brain, you can't be conscious," and a key point of his argument for the reality of the realms he claims to have visited is that his memories could not have been hallucinations, since he didn't possess a brain capable of creating even a hallucinatory conscious experience.

I ask Potter whether the manic, agitated state that Alexander exhibited whenever they weaned him off his anesthetics during his first days of coma would meet her definition of conscious.

"Yes," she says. "Conscious but delirious."

So continues the poisonous effect of modernity on people's ability to take religion seriously. Fortunately for the religious, the issue isn't that religion is simply preposterous in contemporary times. Unfortunately, especially for Christians, the difficulty is to be found in the possibilities modern categories of thought open up for people who really do want to believe, who really do want to talk about varieties of religious experience.

The definitive modern category of thought is literalism, a posture that rejects analogical thinking like metaphor, and other kinds of interpretive wiggle room, in favor of the "plain meaning" of words -- which, once ascertained, is deemed unassailably accurate and valid. This is not the only game in modern town, but it is the point of departure -- no surprise given that modernity emerged from the decades of violent disagreement surrounding Biblical meaning, which, in turn, arose from the advent of the printing press and the democratization of -- yep -- literacy.

'Fundamentalist' Christianity is closely associated with Biblical literalism ("there really was" a Noah and a Whale and a Devil and on and on). Though, to be sure, literalism has long a powerful force in modern (Protestant) Christianity, the situation is more complicated. It's important to focus on why because this helps account for why moronic things happen like Alexander's ill-fated foray into notoriety.

Consider the very modern reaction to literalism -- romanticism. Two of the most powerful romanticists ever to influence American politics are Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy. Here is O'Connor's most naked assertion of legal romanticism, from her opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey:

These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.

And here, neck and neck with that dictum for the gold medal in romantic judicial philosophizing, is Anthony Kennedy, from the just-issued ruling that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act:

The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

However you like the practical upshot of Kennedy's opinion in Windsor, putting "personhood and dignity" at the center of his interpretation of Fifth Amendment law lifts Kennedy wholly outside the bounds of the Constitution. Interestingly, it's a move that's far more consonant with Catholic political thought -- rooted in premodern modes of thinking as it is -- than with Protestant-influenced theory; but Antonin Scalia, a huge Catholic, can't stand it: less because he's a jerk who doesn't believe in dignity than because he's a committed textualist, devoted to sticking to the plain, literal meaning of (in this case, the Constitution's) words.

At any rate, the perils of pinning the law on personhood theory are not very hard to figure out. In a very unflinchingly pro-life essay at National Review, Kevin Williamson bemoans the rise of medieval-feeling speculations about conditions of being that seem utterly unverifiable by any measure. "If we use the biological standard, the embryo is exactly what pro-lifers say it is: a distinct human organism at the early stages of development. If we instead decide to pursue the mystical standard of “personhood,” we may as well be debating about angels dancing on the head of a pin."

Viewed side by side with O'Connor's and Kennedy's legal romanticism, Williamson's warning helps underscore that Americans' thinking on matters of ultimate human significance are strongly influenced both by modern literalism, modern romanticism, and modern science. This is the context where Alexander's flights of hallucinogenic fancy belong. Does his firsthand encounter with "heaven" count as Biblically literalist, because it takes divine paradise to be a real thing? Does it count as anti-literalist, because it closely resembles an acid trip? The frame that Alexander stuck himself with is an unenviable one: he attempted to prove the literal existence of heaven -- a concept that, in the Bible, is itself a mysterious poetic puzzle -- by recourse to a personal story that struggles at every turn not to rely on poetic language to communicate the full measure of his experience.

Not only is Alexander prisoner to these competing, conflicting modern categories of thought -- he's captive to the other three big modes of modern thinking. The first has already just been introduced: the primacy of self-experience as a source of authority. The second is temporal urgency -- the sense that time is ticking. The third is the interrelationship of other people's money and your own value -- the sense that you really won't exist for others in as real a way as you could unless you present yourself to a substantial number of them in a way that they're willing to pay for to experience.

So instead of running off to a mountaintop to further his religious experience in a bout of ascetic solitude, Alexander was motivated above all to prove it, to everyone, right now, for money.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG??

Alluring and inspiring though our modern categories of thought may be, they're incoherent enough to undermine the spiritualism industry from the outset. It's bad enough that the industry's products repeatedly narrow and sterilize our religious imaginations, in the very act of purportedly doing just the opposite. Even worse, they present religious matters in a way that could hardly be better crafted to earn the ridicule and contempt of religion's many vocal critics. Perhaps worst of all, in their modern zeal, they look past their own sloppiness, until, as in Alexander's case, it's far too late.

The good news here -- yes, there actually is some -- is that we spiritual and industrious Americans can choose to drop our modern categories of thought as soon as we get present to how poorly they're working for us. Call it a fusion of pre-modern and post-modern thinking if you must; a key part of the whole move up for consideration is dropping the whole framework that defines modes of thought according to their 'temporal' relationship to modern ones! It's time for popular spiritualists to recognize that Jesus, Augustine, and other big-time Christian figures can hardly be described as literalists or as romantics -- and that this widens, not constrains, the possibilities for a rich, productive conversation about the things we humans so often find most significant to being who we are.

Arguably, that kind of recognition has already begun to happen. But the last big modern hangup, as I suggested one post ago, is the concept of the self. It's a waste of time to try to escape literalism and romanticism if popular spiritualists remain imprisoned in the modern concept of the self. Slip free of those bonds, and the kingdom of heaven -- or, at least, a worthwhile reorientation of our attention in its direction -- really could be at hand.